Republicans are devouring each other's carcasses, and we are here for it! Especially when one of those Republicans is King Kris of the Kansas Votefucker Klan ... errr, Clan! It's been a week since Kansans cast their votes in the gubernatorial primary, and the GOP looks to be rolling up its sleeves for a slugfest.

As we type, Kobach leads by 298 votes out of more than 314,000 cast -- a whopping 0.00095 percent, if you round up! The Kansas GOP begged Donald Trump to stay out of the race and leave the field clear for sitting governor Jeff Colyer, who took over when Sam Brownback wandered off to bring Jesus to the Hottentots on behalf of the US government. Safe bet that Colyer would be gearing up for the general election now if President Twitterthumbs hadn't flapped his yap. So thanks for that, Donny!

No, really, THANKS!

Remember the hanging chad debacle in Florida? Now picture it in a landlocked state with more cows than people. It's like fantasy island for Devin Nunes, ALLEGEDLY.

Oh, but we are to kid!

After first insisting he wasn't going to recuse from the counting, Secretary of State Kris Kobach (one and the same!) wrote Colyer a fabulously bitchy letter agreeing to hand off the tabulation to his deputy, Eric Rucker. Colyer had made the shocking suggestion that Kobach delegate responsibility to the Kansas attorney general, rather than his own political appointee, and Kobach was stretched out on the settee with a fit of the vapors at the gross impropriety of it all!

I will not breach the public trust and arbitrarily assign my responsibilities to another office that is not granted such authority by the laws of Kansas.

After several anguished paragraphs, Kobach closed by remonstrating that Colyer was betraying his office by destroying the faith of Kansans in the sacred integrity of their electoral process.

As governor of Kansas, your unrestrained rhetoric has the potential to undermine the public's confidence in the election process. May I suggest that you trust the people of Kansas have made the right decision at the polls and that our election officials will properly determine the result as they do in every election.

Said the guy whose entire adult life has been dedicated to whipping up panic about millions of imaginary illegal alien voters.

So now these two princes can kick the crap out of each other WITH VOTES, specifically, provisional ballots cast by unaffiliated voters under the supervision of poorly trained poll workers. Kansas holds closed primaries, meaning only registered Republicans can vote to select the GOP candidate, BUT an unaffiliated voter can cast a vote by checking a box identifying as a Democrat or a Republican at the polling place. This was news to some poll workers, who mistakenly directed over one thousand unaffiliated voters to use provisional ballots without checking the box indicating party preference. Whoops!

So, will those provisional ballots be counted based on voter intent? Or tossed based on strict interpretation of the statute? And does Kansas law mandate tossing mail-in ballots that arrive without a postmark on Wednesday, since there's no forensic proof that they were mailed before midnight on Tuesday? And how disgusted will the Kansas electorate be when one of these assholes emerges from the melée holding the other one's scalp? And how many millions of dollars are going to be spent on litigating the Republican primary while this nice lady Laura Kelly, the Democratic minority whip of the Kansas Senate, is out campaigning for November?

Even before this debacle, Kobach looked significantly weaker against Kelly than Colyer, with self-funded Libertarian Jeff Orman threatening to throw a wrench in the works. The Wichita Eagle reports on a Remington Research Poll conducted in July:

In a Kelly-Orman-Kobach race, the poll puts Kelly and Kobach effectively in a dead heat — 36 percent for Kelly and 35 percent for Kobach, with Kelly's lead within the margin of error. Orman has 12 percent.

Colyer leads in a three-way race with Kelly and Orman, according to the poll. In that scenario, Colyer receives 38 percent of the vote, while Kelly gets 28 percent and Orman receives 10 percent.

Which is ONE POLL, in a deeply red state, but ... Kobach is a crap candidate who's likely to emerge from this fight with two black eyes and a pissed off base. If there's anyone who can blow this election, it's Kris Kobach.

HALLELUJAH! The Prosecution rests! And the defense rests, without calling any witnesses! We may actually get to the end of Paul Manafort's Virginia trial before the DC hearings start in September. (We're in hell, right? This is definitely hell.)

Let's review the last 24 hours of the trial before closing arguments start, shall we?

Anybody want to talk about the conniption Grandpappy Hamster Dick is having on Twitter right now? Us neither! This post is about how your president is a fucking idiot whose brain doesn't even work, but there's no need to talk about his tweets right now. The only way this post relates to that is that this morning he has twice sent and twice deleted tweets that referred to the "special councel," because he absolutely refuses to learn how that word is spelled.

Fucking moron.

Let's talk about how Donald Trump didn't know what "Nepal" was, and when he saw it on a map, he called it "Nipple."

Michael Drejka, the guy who shot and killed Markeis McGlockton in front of McGlockton's girlfriend and children in a Clearwater, Florida, convenience store parking lot, was finally arrested and charged with manslaughter Monday. Drejka had initially been turned loose after the local sheriff decided the shooting was legal under Florida's "stand your ground" law, AKA the Open Season on Black People Act. Now that charges have been filed against Drejka, get ready for rightwing media to declare him a brave avatar of self-defense, because after all, McGlockton shoved him, so he feared for his life, don't you know.

OK fine, it is that according to her new book, Donald "Daddy" Trump was really fucking pissed last year when his idiot son Donald "Unfortunately Shaped Offspring" Trump took it upon himself to tweet out the email chain that led to his Trump Tower Russian Treason Meeting. And after Daddy had worked so hard dictating a lie statement about that meeting on Air Force One, to cover everybody's ass! Ungrateful little shit.

Did you read that amazing essay from Stephen Miller's uncle about why young Stephen is a hypocrite and a traitor to his very family's heritage? Please read that. We'll wait.

OK, let's move on.

Vanity Fair brings us a good infuriating read on Stephen Miller's successful stealth campaign to gut US refugee policy in the first two years of the Trump administration. Unlike Steve Bannon, who lived for upsetting the libs, Miller is a somewhat more subtle thug. Sure, he was clearly a driving force behind Trump policies like family separation and moves to denaturalize citizens whenever possible, but as Vanity Fair's Abigail Tracy reports, Miller has also been very busy building rot into what had been a robust system that aided refugees -- and he's managed in remarkably short time to not just strangle refugee resettlement in the US, he's also put people in place to undermine our involvement in international refugee policy. America is first, so the lives of tens of millions of refugees are, by necessity, no longer of concern. Let them die someplace else, OK?

School principals across the lovely state of Florida are getting a real special delivery this week -- giant, 1984-looking signs with the state's motto emblazoned across them, to be displayed prominently in their schools. That motto? "In God We Trust."

Omarosa Manigault Newman has been on a
whirlwind tour promoting her book, which reveals things we already knew: The Trump campaign/administration was and is a shit show filled with nepotism, racists, liars, sycophants and opportunists. But like Sean "P. Diddy" Combs once said, "I thought I told you that we won't stop," and Omarosa is doing just that. But with tapes!

The Trump Administration is finally doing something about school shootings! Nope, nothing to keep guns out of the hands of people bent on killing as many people as quickly as possible, that would be tyranny. But Homeland Security, in a move that ought to make Rick Santorum proud, will be awarding a $1.8 million grant to teach high school kids how to control massive bleeding. As part of overall first-aid training like CPR, it's not a horrible idea. We're just not sure the My First Sucking Chest Wound textbooks are age appropriate.

HALLELUJAH! The Prosecution rests! And the defense rests, without calling any witnesses! We may actually get to the end of Paul Manafort's Virginia trial before the DC hearings start in September. (We're in hell, right? This is definitely hell.)

Let's review the last 24 hours of the trial before closing arguments start, shall we?

Florida GOP state House candidate Melissa Howard
apologized Monday for falsely stating (wait, she's not Donald Trump and this isn't the New York Times, the lady straight-up lied) that she'd graduated from Miami University (the one in Ohio):

Anybody want to talk about the conniption Grandpappy Hamster Dick is having on Twitter right now? Us neither! This post is about how your president is a fucking idiot whose brain doesn't even work, but there's no need to talk about his tweets right now. The only way this post relates to that is that this morning he has twice sent and twice deleted tweets that referred to the "special councel," because he absolutely refuses to learn how that word is spelled.

Fucking moron.

Let's talk about how Donald Trump didn't know what "Nepal" was, and when he saw it on a map, he called it "Nipple."

Michael Drejka, the guy who shot and killed Markeis McGlockton in front of McGlockton's girlfriend and children in a Clearwater, Florida, convenience store parking lot, was finally arrested and charged with manslaughter Monday. Drejka had initially been turned loose after the local sheriff decided the shooting was legal under Florida's "stand your ground" law, AKA the Open Season on Black People Act. Now that charges have been filed against Drejka, get ready for rightwing media to declare him a brave avatar of self-defense, because after all, McGlockton shoved him, so he feared for his life, don't you know.

Poor Lucian Wintrich, the former "White House Correspondent" for the Gateway Pundit (for like three days) is no longer with the organization, according to a very vaguely-worded tweet by Jim Hoft, the Stupidest Man on the Internet. It's not yet clear when or why Wintrich left, although Jared Holt of Right Wing Watch was happy to suggest maybe it had something to do with his reporting on Wintrich's hanging out with a white nationalist dude and spouting racist pseudoscience on the radio. Of course, that would imply either Hoft or Wintrich is capable of feeling ashamed of that stuff.

Can you believe these assholes are making us violate our NO OMAROSA policy
twice in one week?Do we appreciate being forced to take the side of a reality teevee nutjob? No, we do not! But even nutjobs have First Amendment rights. And the Trump Administration needs to GTFOH with this nonsense about using law enforcement to shut their former employee up.

Exhibit A: The Firing

Here's decorated war hero John Kelly telling Ms. Manigault Newman that no one will prosecute her for "serious integrity violations" if she leaves without making a fuss. Omarosa has described this as a threat, and we agree with her. Is it appropriate for a federal official to threaten to sic Johnny Law on a federal employee if she contests her termination? No, it is not!

You can look at your time here in the White House as a year of service to the nation. And then you can go on without any type of difficulty in the future relative to your reputation. But it's very, very important, I think that you understand that there are some serious legal issues that have been violated. And you're open to some legal action that we hope, I think, we can control, right?

Subtle, dude.

Various Republican luminaries have characterized her TAPPING this conversation, which took place in the White House Situation Room, as a
very serious violation of the law. So now it is LOCK HER UP, right?

Is there someone out there suggesting that Omarosa shouldn't have been fired, or is Erick Son of Erick moving the ball again? Hmmmm.

Except, the prohibition on recording unclassified conversations in the White House is a rule,
not a law. (Much like the Streisand Effect.) So Omarosa is in BIG TROUBLE now, and will maybe get fired and lose that security clearance she never had.

OH, WAIT.

And as a side note, why did Kelly insist that an unclassified conversation had to take place in the Situation Room? Were those grownass white men
that terrified of a brown lady? Let's ask Axios -- they always have the inside gossip.

"I'm scared shitless of her... She's a physically intimidating presence," a male former colleague of Omarosa's told me. (He wouldn't let me use a more precise description of his former White House role because he admitted he's still scared of retribution from Omarosa. Other senior officials have admitted the same to me.)

"I never said no to her," the source added. "Anything she wanted, 'Yes, brilliant.' I'm afraid of her. I'm afraid of getting my ass kicked."

Three other former officials shared that sentiment: "One hundred percent, everyone was scared of her," said another former official.

Oh, FFS!

Exhibit B: The NDA

Okay, on to Plan B. Time to send White House staffers out to jump up and down shouting NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT!!! while flinging poo. And who better than Kellyanne Conway to send out on Sunday morning to tell ABC's Jonathan Karl,

I'm told she signed them when she was on 'The Apprentice,' certainly at the campaign. We've all signed them in the West Wing.

Oh, and look who's taking a break from golfing to tap out a few dozen shit-tweets in light of the tape she dropped this morning of her post-termination conversation with the Dotard-in-Chief!

Cool story, bro! Uncle Kelly's gonna need an extra slug out of that fifth he keeps in his desk drawer PROBABLY before he tucks you in tonight and tells you about that time when you were just a little baby dipshit and Reince Priebus got the staff to sign those hush agreements to stop you making another stinky in your diaper. Here on Planet Earth, executive branch communications belong to American citizens, not the White House.
NYT reports:

A few months into his presidency, Mr. Trump — infuriated by leaks about everything from staff rivalries to his bathrobe-wearing, TV-viewing habits — ordered Reince Priebus, then his chief of staff, to do the same thing in the West Wing.

To calm Mr. Trump, Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, drew up a broad document barring White House officials from publicly disclosing what they heard and saw at work. But he privately told senior aides that it was mainly meant to placate an agitated president, who was convinced that the people around him had to be pressured into keeping his secrets. Mr. McGahn made it clear the agreement could not ultimately be enforced, according to several people who signed.

If Omarosa violated any laws, they have to do with maintaining presidential records. So that NDA isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

Exhibit C: The FREAKOUT

Guess it was raining in New Jersey this morning! ABC reports the White House is exploring legal options to stop the former communications director for the Office of Public Liaison from releasing further tapes.
And good luck to them! Maybe they want to check out Wikipedia page for the Pentagon Papers before rushing to ask a court for a prior restraint on political speech. Because SHUT THE FUCK UP IT'S CALLED THE FIRST AMENDMENT is why!

Hey, remember that fun time when Trump threatened to sue Michael Wolff's publisher to stop them putting out that Fire and Fury book? Whatever happened with that?

Oh, right! NOTHING! Which is exactly how much we want to hear about Omarosa until the end of time. Except her book drops tomorrow and we'll probably have to make words about that lunatic again.

A Maryland police officer who was caught on camera repeatedly punching a man has resigned from the Baltimore Police Department, an official said Sunday. [...]

"The officer involved in yesterday's incident is no longer with the Baltimore Police Department," T.J. Smith, chief of media relations, said.

The former officer,
Arthur Williams, is black, as was his involuntary sparring partner, so we guess this is the sort of "black-on-black" crime conservatives always bemoan. It's a rhetorical trick more tired than a Milton Berle routine that's intended to get black people to shut up about police violence, but instead of yelling at NFL players, the offending officer actually did something about it by leaving the force to pursue his true calling with the Golden Gloves.

Remember a few weeks (months? years?) back, when we sat here at Wonkette and live-blogged congressional testimony from FBI agent Peter Strzok for ONE MILLION HOURS, and the biggest thing we learned that day is that Strzok was a badass, the very sort of person we want protecting America from bad guys and Hillary Clinton? We already knew -- because Fox News and Donald Trump have been yelling it at our faces for months -- that Strzok had make a real Stinky Boo Boo when he used his FBI phone to sext with the FBI lawyer lady he had been having an affair with, but there was no evidence that lapse in judgment had brought bias into his work leading the Hillary emails investigation and then the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's obvious criminal conspiracy with Russia to steal the election. The DOJ's inspector general agrees! And of course, special counsel Robert Mueller kicked Strzok off his investigation the second he learned about the Trump-hatin' sexts, to avoid even the appearance of bias.

In short, all the available evidence says Strzok did his job just fine, and that being creeped out by Donald Trump doesn't actually disqualify somebody from being a good FBI agent. Put it this way: everybody with a fucking brain hates Donald Trump, do you really want to fire EVERYBODY WITH A FUCKING BRAIN from the United States government?

Donald Trump does! And today, he has gotten his wish, because despite how the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility only recommended that Strzok be slapped on the wrist and told No More Sexting With Government Phones, Strzok has been fired from the FBI. Don't you feel safer now?????

While the rest of the world was trying to shake off whiskey hangovers, Chris Collins, who represents New York's 27th district in Congress and
who was arrested last week for perhaps maybe doing a whole variety of crimes, including insider trading, posted a whiny butthurt statement to his Twitter account at 7:00 in the goddamn morning Saturday announcing the suspension of his re-election campaign. He blamed "laser focused" Democrats and Nancy Pelosi for trying to soil his "good name" with "meritless charges" in their ongoing efforts to #IMPEACH Trump.